Star Whales

Jedis, are you ready?
Navigating the adorable whale using the power of force.
Hmm... Jedi whale or swordfish?
Look, it's the Halo Shield!
Our calm and controlled Jedi Jin Wei in training.

Star Whales 2021

Inspiration

Inspired by Star Wars elements and an adorable whale, we present to you a world where two settings— the space and the ocean— collide. Contrary to the typical usage of keys as controls in video games, we wanted to create something that allows for a fun, interactive video game experience that incorporates physical gestures as controls. Hence the birth of our video game — Star Whales.

What it does

This video game serves as a fun, stress-reliever that provides users with a taste of the Xbox gaming experience, in which you can activate the whale's superpowers using hand gestures to protect it from the floating obstacles. You get to take a break from the stressful midterms and take care of your mental health! 💕

✋Navigate your whale by the power of "force" (moving your palm up and down)
✊Clench your fist to summon a lightsaber, which your whale can use to whack away debris
👆Point upwards to trigger the halo shield, which protects your whale's water spout

How we built it

👋 Handtrack.js - A library for prototyping realtime hand-detection. It incorporates controls through different hand gestures.

🌎 Planck.js - A physics engine for game development. It builds the collision detector for the point system of the game.

Challenges we ran into

We were faced with the challenges of coming up with the configurations of the obstacles and superpowers, as well as the mapping physics world coordinates to browser coordinates, but we had fun building superpowers for our adorable whale.